Chapter Three #3
Time lost some of its usual shape inside the house.
She still tended the fire and fetched water and forced herself through the ordinary tasks that kept the place and herself standing, but everything bent now around the stranger unconscious on the floor in her house.
She found herself listening for changes in his breathing, listening for any sign of movement while rinsing cloths at the basin or cutting roots for the pot.
He rarely woke fully. Most often he drifted somewhere between sleep and fever, restless beneath the fur she’d laid over him, his brow drawn tight as if whatever hunted him in life continued to pursue him in sleep.
Sometimes he muttered rough fragments she could not understand at all, words running together too quickly or slurred by exhaustion.
Once he spoke sharply in a tone that made Charlie lift his head and stare, though the words themselves meant nothing to her beyond the anger in them.
His hands moved occasionally as though reaching for something that was not there. Twice he woke enough to try and push himself upright before pain or weakness overtook him again. The first time startled her badly enough that she nearly dropped the wooden bowl she was holding.
“Be still,” she told him instinctively, using the old man’s language as it was this man’s language as well.
The stranger only frowned harder, breathing through his teeth as he struggled half blindly. His eyes opened briefly then—gray and unfocused—and fixed on her without recognition.
“Sword,” he muttered thickly.
She stared at him a moment before conceiving a reply. “It’s here,” she told him, though in truth the sword still lay out in the forest with the rest of his things. “It’s safe.”
Whether he understood her or not, she could not tell. His head tipped back against the rolled fur she’d placed beneath it and moments later he drifted again into uneasy sleep.
By evening the house smelled sharply of fever sweat, herbs, smoke, and the bitter tea she kept trying to force into him whenever he woke enough to swallow.
Too often, irritation at this intrusion thrust upon her gave way again to that same uneasy fascination she could not quite rid herself of.
She kept noticing him, the breadth of his chest beneath the rise and fall of fevered breathing and the thick muscle across his shoulders; the scars that seemed to cover almost every part of his body and the dark bruising along one side of his ribs that looked painful enough that often she winced along with him when he shifted.
The old man had once filled the place with quiet presence and routine, but this felt entirely different. The stranger’s sheer size altered the shape of the room itself, leaving little for her and Charlie.
That night she slept lightly again, though not because she feared him but rather because she kept waking to check whether he still breathed.
Several times she rose to kneel beside him and press cool water cloths against his throat and forehead the way the old man once had for her.
The fever burned steadily beneath his skin.
Once, sometime deep in the night while rain whispered faintly beyond the walls again, she woke to find him shivering violently despite the heat pouring off him.
She chewed her lip with uncertainty before finally relinquishing her own fur, dragging it across him and kneeling there longer than necessary afterward, watching his face in the dim firelight.
His expression fascinated her. Though he slept and was fevered nearly beyond sense, he constantly wore the faint shape of a frown, as though displeasure sat naturally upon him. He looked like a man temporarily detained against his will by his own body, and was deeply dissatisfied about it.
She slept wrapped in the plaid blanket she’d found on the dead horse, finding it gloriously warm and weighty, and toward morning she woke again to the sound of movement and found him struggling half upright, one hand braced hard against the floorboards while the other clutched weakly at his side.
She sat up quickly, dropping the blanket off her shoulders.
His hair hung forward across his face. Sweat gleamed across his bare shoulders and chest in the firelight. The muscles along his arm and stomach tightened visibly with the effort of holding himself upright despite the injury before his strength failed almost all at once.
She moved without thinking, catching him awkwardly beneath one arm before he would have sagged sideways into the fire. The full weight of him nearly took her down with him.
He made a low sound of pain and frustration together, his head briefly dropping against her shoulder before he managed to steady himself enough to remain half sitting.
Up close like this, she became painfully aware of him as a man in a way she had not allowed herself to think about before.
The heat of his skin seeped through the thin fabric of her sleeve.
His breath brushed warm and uneven against her throat.
One massive hand flexed weakly against the floor beside her knee, scarred and rough enough to make her think absurdly of bark stripped from trees.
She held her breath and waited for sleep or the fever to claim him again.
Instead, he turned his face up to hers, his eyes barely slitted open.
“Where...?” he muttered hoarsely, the word rough with confusion and fever alike.
“My house,” she answered quietly. She thought to add something she’d want to know, if their circumstances were reversed. “Safe.”
He frowned harder at that, as though even unconsciousness could not fully dull suspicion, and then the little strength holding him upright vanished altogether.
His weight settled heavily against her before sliding slowly back onto the furs beside the fire.
She remained sitting there afterward for several minutes, one hand still caught awkwardly against his shoulder where she had tried to steady him.
Charlie lifted his head from near the wall and watched her silently.
After a long moment, she pulled her hand away.